I have experienced, so many times in recent years, stopping myself from doing whatever it is that I creatively want to do at the immediate moment. There are moments when I want to pursue an idea or an activity, but something “more urgent” would come along, and I would forget the entire thing. Then, that “urgent” thing doesn’t seem to be truly urgent. When I think about it, it was more of an excuse to avoid doing what I thought of doing. But why? Personally, it’s my fear of wasting my time and the dread of making mistakes. A writer and artist shouldn’t be afraid of making stuff. That’s when I knew something was wrong.

So I experimented. I noticed it being most prevalent when I was scrolling through social media. I would encounter content (mostly in the form of a short-form video) that would make me think about something, and before I could delve deeper into what it was that I thought about, the reel looped again, making it irksome. To stop that, I’d scroll up. I lost what I was thinking about. To recapture the same feeling of discovering something, I’d scroll up again. And again, waiting for that content that would rekindle an epiphany. Nothing did. I end up hating myself for wasting my time brain-rotting. My solution: To carry a pen and paper with me, in my pocket, everywhere I go, even if I’m just staying at home all day.

The goal was to record everything that I thought of as soon as it came to me. This applies not only while scrolling in social media (which I find that I’m doing less these days), but I also have to record my thoughts all the time on a scrap piece of paper. Thoughts that I needed to untangle in my head, thoughts that I need to write down to flesh out, and even random fleeting thoughts about stuff I cannot say out loud. Things that I’d rather be out of me than to fester and rot inside of me. Some of these thoughts, I realized, were really good enough that I could make them into essays. If it wasn’t for the process of carrying a pen and paper with me all the time, I wouldn’t have captured it.

I decided to extend that practice to actually doing stuff as soon as they come to me. I needed something to write on without being guilty about messing up the aesthetics of the paper, as I will certainly write all kinds of crap on it. I was thinking I might need to buy a cheap notebook. But I know I need it now, there’s an unused A3 journal on my desk, and I don’t care about what it looks like. I ended up cutting the notebook’s leaves from the spine, cutting them in half, and then binding them together with a stapler. Now I have a smallish notebook that looks like crap to be cautious about how I treat it, and I now have something to write on without waiting for my online order to arrive or even the weekend to buy at the store. I wrote ideas, doodled images from my head, looked up any questions that I had, recorded stuff that had piqued my interest, and did whatever I needed to do to satisfy my curiosity and creativity. I felt like I was a kid again, running to our family desktop or our library to look things up when I wanted to know more about them, with a pencil and school pad in tow. I guess building the habit of just doing it negates the fear of actually starting. Someone said that if I consider everything a practice, then I haven’t truly failed. But Wes Anderson in The French Dispatch also said: Just make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.

I figured that doing stuff as soon as it comes to you builds your confidence into a shameless and productive creative life.

Secret to limitless creativity: Follow your whimsy.

11/10/2025